Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Monday, June 18, 2012

Sic Semper Tyrannis? There’s an App for That!

Can a mobile phone app help an oppressed people bring down a dictator? We might be able to find out.

Reepl “Resist Edition”, coming out soon to a barricade near you, is an Android App that might contribute to bringing down dictatorships, such as the Castro Brothers family hideout and prison camp.

It lets people on smartphones communicate within crowds using the Bluetooth capability of the phone, even if state authorities have shut down the mobile phone network. A device that receives the message repeats it, thus letting it bounce or ripple like a pebble thrown into a pond.

In fact the short range nature of the frequencies Bluetooth make it hard for authorities to do any direction-finding from a distance, and it wouldn’t look any different than the crowd found in any other place that has a bunch of people in it that have the Bluetooth on their phones on.